School District Personnel

An invitation to the Difference Makers,

You are a difference maker in this community. With this in mind, you are invited to learn about a model for working with young people and families called Family SBIRT. This model has demonstrated effectiveness for achieving positive outcomes for juvenile justice system-involved youth through authentic family-centered engagement. Family SBIRT has the potential to make a difference in our community’s responsiveness to a certain group of referrals to the juvenile department. With success and your input, it might continue to grow and evolve.

Family SBIRT Overview:

Family SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral To...) is a community-based engagement and service navigation model for young people and their families who are involved or at-risk for involvement in the juvenile justice system. The primary goal of the model is identifying and addressing challenges which may lead young people to become court-involved including mental health, substance use, and trauma-related disorders. Family SBIRT (F-SBIRT) was developed by Reclaiming Futures in partnership with the St. Charles CARE Center.

Reclaiming Futures is a nationally recognized public health organization that works with municipalities across the U.S. to achieve innovative reforms within child serving systems including courts and schools. F-SBIRT is an evidence-based approach to identifying, preventing, and reducing risky or unhealthy behaviors in children and adolescents. It is not a therapeutic intervention. Rather, the goal of F-SBIRT is to identify the strengths, challenges, and needs of children and families in order to help empower and connect them to accessible community-based resources for meaningful, sustainable behavior change.

We want you to be a part of talking through this Family SBIRT process with other community minded and involved organizations and people and to walk through how this might make an impact in Grayson County and determining how it might impact current processes from referral to outcome.

We will have the opportunity to hear from the developers of the approach, some innovative providers/consumers of the approach, and from other key community figures.

The plan is to set up a time for the entire community to convene, listen, and be in dialogue on January 30, 2026 along with some possibility for smaller group meetings and discussion on January 29th.

We are meeting with the School District Personnel group on Thursday, January 29th from 3:00-4:00 p.m. in seminar B at the Center for Workplace Learning (CWL) at Grayson College. Can we count on you or someone (or multiple people) from your organization to attend?

On Friday, January 30th, we will invite all interest parties to lean into the model and learn it well enough with the intent to begin considering implementation steps. This meeting will take place from 10:00a.m.-2:00 p.m. in the auditorium at the Austin College IDEA center located at 900 N. Grand Avenue, Sherman, TX 75090 . Please indicate in the invitation if you would also plan to be at this meeting (even if you were not available on the 29th). Please consider inviting – and having them register – other difference makers that you know from the community.

Our goal is to launch F-SBIRT through a community-based provider as an intervention for specific juvenile offenses.

We would particularly like to have conversations with those who have different roles in aspects of juveniles and family violence - to learn more about the community experiences in making arrests, conducting intakes, performing screening decisions, monitoring performance of diversion plans, and available resources for individual and family counseling in the community. We will do this with invited groups across disciplines on Thursday,January 29th.

On Friday, January 30th, we will focus on the implementation of F-SBIRT for “informal – supervisory caution” family violence cases.

Thanks,

Greg Sumpter

Director – Chief Juvenile Probation Officer

Grayson County Juvenile Services

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